‘Smoking kills more people than Obama’ posters appear in Moscow

A Moscow advert declaring that “smoking kills more people than Obama” has gone viral, becoming the latest in a string of actions condemning the US president as a mass killer.

Dmitry Gudkov, the sole liberal opposition MP in Russia’s parliament, on Tuesday posted a photograph of the large poster, which was in a metal-and-glass frame at a bus shelter on Moscow’s third ring road.

“Smoking kills more people than Obama, although he kills lots and lots of people,” the poster read, showing an illustration of the president smoking the last dregs of a cigarette. “Don’t smoke, don’t be like Obama.”

Gudkov wrote that it was “disgusting and embarrassing that this is appearing on the streets of the Russian capital.” His Facebook post had received more than 1,300 likes, hundreds of positive and negative comments and extensive Russian media coverage. “Soon they’ll be scaring kids with Obama rather than Baba Yaga,” the witch from Russian folk tales, Gudkov later told the Guardian. The advert has no attribution, no author has come forward to claim it and Moscow city hall has not commented. Read more